Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

It is the generally-accepted meaning of success, perhaps in its lowest sense, the contrary of failure ; and I mean the same as Mr. Morley does when he speaks of success in the following words : — ' It is the bitterest element in the vast irony of human life that the time- worn eyes to which a son's success would have brought the purest gladness are so often closed for ever before success has come.' If the fashion grows of parents handing over to -children some of the money which would otherwise come SONS 273 to them only after their parents' death, the habit of early saving when expenses are increased on first leaving home might enable young people to live much more economically than they have done in the luxurious houses where they have been brought up. Anybody who remembers the accounts of the childhoods of our grandfathers and grandmothers will realise what a garret life the children of rich people led at the beginning of the century. The following anecdote is a small instance in point : — My grandparents were very rich, and spent 60,OOOZ. on the Parliamentary election of their eldest son. My mother, who came in the middle of a large family, has often described to me how underfed she was as a child, and how she would gladly pick up and eat the sucked crusts dropped by the babies on the nursery floor. Another of the terrors of her childhood was that during the cold Northern winters the nurserymaid used to be sent down to break the ice on a fountain in the yard, where the children were habitually bathed, as a means of strengthening them. She also remembered the keen delight with which they welcomed the news that the ice was un- breakable. When they grew up, after seventeen their life was merged into that of their parents, and my mother used to wonder what they would think of her — she had seen so little of them during her childhood. This bringing-up may certainly have had the effect of enabling the children of the rich to make poorer mar- riages than they are willing to do now after being nursed in the lap of luxury from their infancy. Poor marriages can be very happy if both parties realise what they undertake, and if the husband belongs to a profession where an increase of income is possible, and where his professional expenditure and the position he has to main- tain are not out of all proportion to his income as a married man. Members of society who marry poor T 274 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN make a great mistake in thinking that by living even as many as eighteen years in retirement they will lose all their friends in a way that would prove disadvantageous either to themselves or their children. The friends of our youth are our contemporaries, and we never can forget or meet on terms of formality the men and women with whom we once were intimate. The first word that drops from the lips, on meeting after years of separation, is, as often as not, the old familiar Christian name.